The Hindu : Show cause notice issued to telecom firm

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Thursday, Nov 21, 2002

Business

Business

Show cause notice issued to telecom firm

By Our Special Correspondent

NEW DELHI NOV. 20. The Communications Ministry has issued a show cause notice to a major telecom company after the Delhi Police busted a long distance call racket, which was depriving its public sector counterparts of their rightful revenue. This was stated by the Communications Minister, Pramod Mahajan, in the Lok Sabha during question hour today.

Mr. Mahajan said the notice was issued to Bharti Telecom because its network was being used to make long distance calls and earn revenue whereas the calls were originating from the networks of the two PSUs — BSNL and MTNL.

"World Callnet (ClearTel as brand name) was advertising and selling pre-paid STD/ISD cards to telephone customers in and around Delhi without a licence. The calls made from MTNL/BSNL customers were being routed through the lines obtained by Cleartel from Bharti (brand name Touchtel) at Gurgaon. Thus the long distance calls originating from MTNL/BSNL were being converted into originating calls of Touchtel (Bharti). Due to this they were deprived of their legitimate revenue.''

The Minister said, ''as far as Bharti is concerned, it has been asked how its network was being used by ClearTel which had taken 180 PCO lines from it. Whenever someone asks for connections from BSNL, according to me three lines is the maximum. When that person asked for 180 lines, Bharti should have paid attention. It is known that PCOs do not run on automatic machines but are manually operated. When someone is trying to run PCOs on automatic machines, Bharti should have paid attention to it, which it did not.

"This fact came to the Communications Ministry's notice and it was learnt that the BSNL was suffering losses. Though the BSNL subscribers were making calls, they were being routed through Bharti. A complaint was lodged with the police and a show cause notice issued to the private company. All the connections were also cancelled.''

Mr. Mahajan said several steps had been taken to detect telecom fraud. The fraud was detected after the Ministry during routine investigation of advertisements promising extremely cheap bargains. MTNL is also installing an automatic software called `fraud management control system' which will track calls from Mumbai and Delhi and try to investigate any abnormality. Special Communications Ministry-funded CBI cells had also been set up, mainly in the four metros.

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